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Besides, these guys are more than savvy enough that if they felt using blogs would have been helpful, they would have set them up already. So who am I to say?

lol which guys are we talking about?

Oh nobody in particular. Just a few people who built something rather remarkable - and who scored a quarter million registrations and a higher number of forum posts in just five years, assuming Wikipedia is current with their stats.

So no big deal, right? What could they possibly know? Doesn't every website do just as well as this crew?

You know it occurs to me that someone at one of these providers should have enough foresight to think that hosting a DC server would be a good way to get a lot of very cheap very good publicity to a highly-targetted audience, and show a bit of support for a very active development community.

You know it occurs to me that someone at one of these providers should have enough foresight to think that hosting a DC server would be a good way to get a lot of very cheap very good publicity to a highly-targetted audience, and show a bit of support for a very active development community.

it's really true.. if i was better at these things i probably would have secured such a "sponsoring" for DC long ago.. it's one of the rare cases where we would probably be happy to take the sponsored hosting and be proud to let people know about the hosting company that provided it, ASSUMING the hosting was really top quality, and they were willing to make a long time commitment to us.

My great fear with using a separate blog system (as we did early on in DC existence when we had regular "columnists") is that the different sources of content (forum posts, blogs) are pretty walled-off from one another and it creates a very weird schizophrenic situation where it's hard to know what should go where and who is seeing what.

Hear ye, hear ye! - as a regular, I find that those items work just fine as forum threads, and I'd hate to have it moved externally.

I can see the value of having it available in blog format, though, for people who aren't very interested in participating in the forums. The current homebrew pseudoblog interface is a beginning, but it's not perfect - "/blog" and "/technews" have the same RSS feed as the main page, and "/CodingSnacks" has no feed. IMHO, the "pseudoblog" parts of the site should have their own RSS links that only show items from the pseudoblog.

Other than that, I think it's relatively decent. We definitely don't want anonymous blog comments (it's trash, trash, trash and TRASH), so I don't see a problem in requiring a forum account and using the forum to handle comments. But perhaps it should be possible to at least view the entire posts in the pseudoblog format instead of being taken to the forum? Perhaps even to add quick comments too? It would still integrate with the forum model, it would just be a different view of the data...

Note that while we used to have separate main server and much smaller member server, now we are moving everything to one server and using virtual machines.

Bleh. If I knew you were looking for a new server I coulda told you about a Black Friday deal where an i7, 16 GB RAM, 10 TB (5 TB in/out) on a 100 Mbps dedicated, 1x1TB, 8 IP was available for $100. You could have got two of them and made a few upgrades and still come out cheaper than the SL you just got.

i think the other thing to consider is that stability and reliability are the main reason we went with softlayer in the first place.. so i'd be hesitant to move anywhere other than a dedicated hosting company with a really good reputation.

This is true - stability is always important. However, the offer wasn't from a no-name; it was from TurnKey Internet, who have been around for a while and are fairly large (although not as big as SoftLayer). I took advantage of the TurnKey Internet deal (although I didn't go with the i7, but I wish I did) and so far they have been great.

Did you look into WiredTree? They have an excellent reputation around webhosting circles and are typically cheaper than SoftLayer; plus they offer fully managed services.